The left needs to start again: interview with Ken Loach

Loach's new film, Spirit of '45, is an impassioned account of the unity that built the post-war welfare state, contrasted with the dismantling we are witnessing today. Oliver Huitson talks to him about the film, welfare, Thatcher, the unions and the modern Labour party. Can we recapture the spirit?

Oliver Huitson:Production of the film
was announced very shortly after the passing of the Health and Social Care Act, in March
2012. To what extent did the passage of the NHS reforms influence your decision to
make the film? Was it more a response to the general attacks on the welfare
state since 2010?

Ken Loach: Obviously the Health and Social Care Act is just one rung on
a downward ladder. The idea of making a record of the spirit after the war is
something that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time. I had the chance
to do this documentary and I thought this is the moment to try and do it. The
other thing was that people who have sharp memories of it are… we need to
capture them while they’re still here. So there’s an urgency from that point of
view. But also the biggest reason was that the economic system we have is so
manifestly failing on every front. And the more it fails the more its
proponents push it and try and prop it up with ever more desperate results. I
thought it was time we remembered what happened after ‘45 and try and learn
from it. It’s been written out of history because it’s in none of the main
parties’ interest to remember it. Of course the Tories don’t want to remember
it, nor the Liberals, and the Labour party certainly don’t because they are
vehement free marketers themselves.

OH: Have you been surprised
in that regard, in terms of what’s happened post-2008, in the sense that many
expected a sort of reversal of neoliberal trends of the last 30 years - have
you been surprised that they’ve gone into overdrive rather than reverse?

KL: No not at all because the more desperate people get the more
they go to the [extreme] of their essential ideology. Labour even doing what
they did in ‘45 were still social democrats and social democrats believe
capitalism is progressive and they just have to manage it, rather better than
the Tories. So the more desperate times get, the more they are prepared to
sacrifice the social wage and social benefit in order to keep capitalism propped
up. And Tories don’t care because that’s their agenda anyway. Labour and
Miliband, with his idea of benign capitalism, so misunderstands the nature of
the system that you wonder where he’s been living. It’s certainly not how he
was brought up. If there’s one thing he would have learnt from home, it’s that
capitalism is based on class conflict
not class collaboration.

OH: Ok let’s come back to
the modern Labour party later. Obviously
in terms of the legislative creation of the welfare state, you cover it a lot
in the film, but what was the spirit
of those years?

KL: It was one of working together. The experience of the war
was that clearly the armed forces were organised by the state, not private
armies going off to fight. There wasn’t, like we have now, private contractors
going off to do the work of the military; they were armies of the state. Some
of the industries were taken over because they couldn’t be run by private
companies, they were so inefficient, like the mines had to be taken over. And clearly
the sacrifice and the bombing and the home front as well as the soldiers brought
people together, people just had to
be good neighbours, so that engendered a feeling of collectivity, of solidarity,
so that was one element.

Another element was the depression and mass unemployment
of the 30s, the conflict of the 20s, the rise of fascism, and the dictators,
and a general feeling that in order to solve the problems of the peace, why
shouldn’t we use the ways we solved the problems of the war, which was working
together? And it was a matter of common sense, not a question of ideology. We’ve been working like this for six years, with
good results, this is how we should continue to work together to build people's
homes and look after them and establish the industries again.

OH: There was a long
history of advances within the labour movement, but do you think without the
war the creation of the welfare state would have been possible?

KL: I think war was the catalyst. I think then, like now, there
was a feeling of resentment, of desperation, but the 30s were a very quiet
period. The general strike was well before, in ‘26, and the big coal strikes
were right at the beginning of the 20s. So in the 20s there was industrial
struggle, in the 30s unemployment settled down to 2.5m to 3m. That was a very quiet
period, and it needed, with hindsight, you could say it needed that terrible
jolt, and what a terrible thing that was, but without that jolt it’s difficult
to see what would have shaken people out of the despair of the 30s, to get
organised, and elect a Labour government with elements of a socialist
programme. It wasn’t a socialist programme but it had elements of a socialist programme.

In the film you
covered the creation of the welfare state and then we sort of jump to ‘79,
Thatcher, privatisations - how in your mind was Thatcher able to not just win
the election in ‘79 but a further two elections on a platform of reversing many
of the gains made post-war?

Well… the long Tory government of the 50s, and the Labour
governments of the 60s and 70s didn’t regenerate the idea of common ownership,
they didn’t establish any industrial democracy. They stayed as state
organisations where they were run as private corporations, where there was
still conflict between the management and the workforce. They didn’t
regenerate, they didn’t invest properly, so the concept fell into decay and the
industries themselves fell into decay; they were ripe to be taken over. And Thatcher
of course pursued that by refusing to invest so everybody got fed up with the
notion and she could then present privatisation as a remedy, and I think that
was quite a conscious decision.

Why did the Tories get elected? Because Labour failed as social
democrats. I guess the world economy was against them, but that’s through what
some of us would call the inherent conflicts in the system itself, inherent
contradictions; capitalism goes through these cycles. It was failing, and the Labour
party still tried to prop up capitalism like they have done ever since, and they
paid the penalty. Thatcher could come in as a new broom, as finding a solution
to the tired old nationalised industries, attacking the unions because the
Labour party had bore the brunt of working with the trade unions but being in
conflict with them. And the Tory press of course, we should never underestimate
that, and Thatcher could come in as a new broom. But she still had to defeat
the unions, and some of us would argue that the privatisations happened because
the unions were defeated and the miners were beaten into the ground with police
trunctions.

If we go back to
welfare for a moment, you’ve talked elsewhere of the impact on community life
and families over the last few decades. If we look at welfare provision of
housing, for example, is there a sense in which welfare itself has removed
elements of community and weakened them by transferring what would have been
done by local community ties to an impersonal state?

Well, there’s a lot of assumptions in that… but where to
begin unpicking them. The fact that it’s done collectively, for which you might
say the state, it isn’t necessarily impersonal - it can be impersonal, I don’t know really. The most potent democratic
way is for housing, and the whole location or area, to be planned through the municipality
and the council; done with direct labour, as direct democratic participation;
done with good architects and good planners, where housing is planned, green
spaces are planned, schools, hospitals, and most particularly work. Because to
find ways for people to live well, work and employment has got to be part of
the picture. And you can’t plan that if you’re just trying to tempt private
business. So the whole idea of planning will fall down if you can’t plan employment,
and that means common ownership in the end, and I think it’s foundered on that
point.

So now we have a situation where we’re desperately trying to
build houses in the South-East, but some of the areas in the North where
industry drained away we have empty houses, and the market economy can’t solve
that. So the state can be impersonal but it just depends how you organise it. Big
Business is always impersonal because
they’re accounting to shareholders - not local people.

The film itself is
openly polemical. What do you think of the response of popular culture to the
financial crash and austerity in general, where this sort of polemic seems
quite rare?

Difficult to say, I’m not sure what popular culture is. There’s
a culture that’s developed through the new media, which can be quite subversive
and critical, a product of the austerity cuts and the rest. But inevitably
that’s like a firework display, it won’t lead to a coherent movement with a
coherent program, but its nevertheless an inevitable response. I think the
popular media in terms of the mainstream press and broadcasting is as you would
expect, it’s very favourable to the government. It promotes divisions amongst
working people, it finds scapegoats, benefit claimants are demonised, unlike
the tax evaders who float in and out but on the subject of permanent attack,
anyone claiming benefits is made to feel guilty. There’s a huge attack on
immigrants, which is traditional, they always have to find scapegoats when the
economy is crashing. It’s never the people that caused the crash, or are
benefiting from it, it’s the people who are poorest off, so there’s no surprise
there.

The danger of course is it’s a breeding ground for fascism. There’s
mass unemployment, targeted scapegoats, no representation for the left politically.
We have no representation, not in a political movement, not in broadcasting,
not in the press… The articulate left barely exists and yet there’s a huge
groundswell of anger about what’s happened, but its not focused in a political
movement, and kept out of focus by the mainstream media

And finally, on that
point, if we talk about Labour as it exists today, is there any hope for a
reformed Labour party or has the time come for a mass democratic organisation
beyond the Labour party?

We’ve been talking about reforming the labour party for a
century haven’t we? Since Ramsay McDonald walked away from the general strike… And
the 1945 government was a blip really, in the Labour party’s achievement, but I
can’t see the Labour party developing a socialist leadership. I can’t see it. I’ve
been on the fringes of politics for 50 years and this is what people have said
at every point, and the Labour party has moved consistently to the right in its
leadership.

I think the key role is played by the trade unions. If the unions
said we’re going to do what we did a century ago, we’re going to found a party
to represent the interests of labour, and we will only support candidates who
will support policies of the left then we could start again. But we need a new
movement and a new party. And it needs all the people on the left of the Labour
party who’ve spent their life complaining about it to get out and start a new
one, with the unions.

It needs the unions because they have resources. If Unite, Unison,
GMB, you know, said we’ve had enough… But they’re like dogs, the more you kick them
the more they creep back to master. And they actually need to wake up and say
this is not going to happen, we’re not going to reclaim the Labour party. I
mean the last [Labour] leadership election the left didn’t even have a
candidate, this was after decades of people saying reclaim the Labour party -
couldn’t even get a candidate because it had been purged by Blair and his gang.
The unions have got to cut the ties, start again, with everyone on the left, with
all the campaigns, the NHS campaign, the housing campaign, the community
services campaigns – everybody. And let’s begin again, and then we could really
move.

Oliver Huitson is Co-Editor at OurKingdom and a freelance journalist. He contributed chapters to Jenny Manson's 2012 book, Public Service on the Brink, and NHS SOS (2013). He has written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, Vice and the BBC. He is on Twitter as @OllyHuitson

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